


rule of perspective

by earlgreyhui



Category: SK8 the Infinity (Anime)
Genre: Appropriation of a play structure for my own purposes, Childhood Friends to Lovers, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Slice of Life, ao3 stop changing the formatting of my notes and summary every time i edit challenge, canon-verse, filling in the blanks that the show will hopefully leave unexplored, freewheeling through my own conjectured backstory, or something, will add tags as I go along
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-01
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-13 14:00:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29777193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earlgreyhui/pseuds/earlgreyhui
Summary: A light wind picks up around the two of them, and the kite jumps in Kojiro’s arms like a bird yearning to be free. Loose strands of pink hair flutter around Sakurayashiki Kaoru’s face like the cherry blossom petals of his name blown loose in a swirl of sweet spring air. At that age, Kojiro is not paying attention, not truly, but inexplicably, the luminescence of his curious firefly-eyes as he watches Kojiro demonstrate how to fly the kite stays seared in his memory for a long time, always young and always immortalised, there under the stooping tree on the grassy hill against a clear blue sky.Between now and back then under the same blue sky, ever unchanging; a study on change, relearning old habits, and how even the most world-shaking of things become small when viewed from a long way down the road in hindsight, the laws of perspective absolute and intractable in their dominion over all things.(or: your obligatory childhood-friends-to-lovers slice-of-life story that every ship of this type must have by legal requirement)
Relationships: Nanjo Kojiro | Joe & Sakurayashiki Kaoru | Cherry Blossom, Nanjo Kojiro | Joe/Sakurayashiki Kaoru | Cherry Blossom
Comments: 7
Kudos: 20





	rule of perspective

**Author's Note:**

> I feel a bit like I’ve just invented my own versions of kaoru’s and kojiro’s personalities and am just running with it without looking back so if they read as ooc to you, my sincerest apologies
> 
> also im not new to writing fic but new to this fic-posting business pls be kind to me

_(late spring, 8 years old)_

There is a new family that has recently moved into the neighbourhood. Apparently the wife is a professional calligraphy artist, and her husband is an aerospace engineer who works in Tokyo, although he is staying in Okinawa with the family for the week. Of course, Kojiro has no interest in either them or their son, preferring instead to race the other children his age down the nearby hill on their bicycles again and again and again, none of them ever tiring of the sport right up until one of the boys nosedives straight into a tree and breaks his arm and all the mothers immediately ban their children from the hill in terror. Kojiro spends a few days after that moping around the house in utter boredom, looking for some new game to immerse himself in, until his mother leaves the house one day to have lunch with the new neighbours while his father is out at work. He goes into the storeroom, using the key hidden under the table lamp that his mother thinks he doesn’t know about although he really does, and retrieves his bicycle, upon which he has the brilliant idea to ride it around the living room where he can see his mother before she comes up the driveway. This goes surprisingly smoothly until he makes a turn slightly too sharply and crashes into the coffee table, knocking two flower vases to the ground. While he is standing over the shattered mess frantically deliberating his next move, he misses his mother’s arrival back home; she finds him at the scene of the crime, trying to sweep up the porcelain shards with his bicycle leaning against the wall next to him in full incriminating view.

Somewhat surprisingly, she isn’t too furious about it. She cleans up the mess, restores the bicycle to its spot, and changes the hiding place of the key, all with a look on her face like she isn’t sure whether to laugh or to shout at him. In the end, she sits him down and laments that she’s partly to blame for being so careless, but even so that doesn’t mean Kojiro can get off scot-free. He’s banned from the television for three days, and in addition, he has to at least try to befriend the new neighbours’ boy, who she has heard from his parents is his age and finding it hard to make friends. Of course, she adds, she will know if he does this or not, since she’s such good friends with the family now, apparently. Kojiro has no choice but to begrudgingly agree.

When his father returns home from work and hears of the incident, he laughs.

This is how Kojiro ends up trudging up the same hill he was banned from, bicycle-less and empty-handed except for a pocketful of marbles in case the kid has nothing to do. He finds the boy sitting on his heels on the grass under a large tree, staring blankly up at the half-hidden shape of a kite caught in the branches high above him, its colourful streamers fluttering in the wind like the plumage of an exotic bird. His hair is as pink as the intricately painted cherry blossom buds that decorate Kojiro’s aunt’s most prized tea set, even more silken up close than from a distance and tied back neatly from his fair face with a bit of red ribbon so that he resembles nothing so much as a china doll crafted with painstaking attention to detail. When Kojiro approaches him, he barely turns his head, as if lost in his own world.

“Is that your kite?” Kojiro asks, pointing.

Only then does the boy look at him, as if noticing his presence for the first time. His eyes are tree-sap golden, calm and silently assessing behind the frames of his wire-rimmed glasses turned into crescent moon arcs of reflected sunlight. He nods once but says nothing.

(Kaoru was always so quiet back then, when they were children. Later on, Kojiro will repeatedly reminisce loudly, jokingly, about those times and mourn how much things have changed since then. Every time Kaoru will swat him about the back of his head with his closed fan in response without so much as changing expression.)

Present-day Kojiro tilts his head in plain confusion. “Then why don’t you climb up there and get it? Why’re you sitting on the ground?”

“… Climb?” the boy asks. This is the first word he has said to Kojiro thus far. He says nothing beyond this single word, angled upward in an audible question mark, but the faint note of distaste that colours it speaks clearly enough for itself.

“Yeah,” Kojiro says, with the unshakeable conviction of a child stating something blindingly obvious to them, so obvious that even an idiot ought to understand. “It’s easy and it’d beat sitting around under this tree just waiting for the kite to fall out of it.”

“Hm,” the boy says evasively. “Based on the current wind speed and the rate at which the movement of the tree foliage has been pushing the kite forward over the past ten minutes, I estimate that the kite should come loose within the next half hour at most, with an uncertainty of five percent.”

Kojiro wisely chooses to ignore every word of that sentence apart from a single phrase, his opinion of which he is more than happy to convey, with great incredulity. “Half an hour! Why, you could climb five trees in that time, easy.”

The boy blinks at him silently.

Suddenly uncertain, Kojiro hesitates and peers at him. “Or… can’t you climb trees?”

No response, again. The boy’s eyebrows, pink as his hair and so perfectly slender they might have been hand-painted onto his doll-like face with a fine brush, draw together ever so minutely in a frown.

Because Kojiro is a child, and tactless, naturally he then says the first thing that comes into his mind without a second thought or care. “What, are you serious? I’ve never met someone who couldn’t even climb a tree! What do you do for fun, then?”

The boy has looked away, his fine features slipping deeper into a scowl, finally showing a flash of emotion in the angry flush that has begun to suffuse his cheeks despite how much he tries to hide it. Kojiro clicks his tongue the way his mother does when he sulks and catches at his arm, fragile under his fingers like a bird’s bones in a bag of tissue paper skin. A spark of pity rises in him. The boy is new to the neighbourhood, and Kojiro has never seen him with any of the other kids even once, always on his own with the expression on his face an impregnable fortress of cool indifference. Besides, Kojiro has come here on a mission, and if he fails it he will certainly feel his mother’s wrath for it when he gets back.

“Hey, wait, how about this—” he tries. “I can climb the tree and get the kite for you. Then we can both play with it, together. What do you say?”

Against all odds, the kid actually responds. “You’re a brute,” he sniffs, turning his little nose up into the air. “I don’t want to play with you.”

Thunderstruck by this utter lack of gratitude, Kojiro advances on the delicate-boned, slighter-framed boy, an eyebrow twitching darkly. “Say that again, you pink glasses-wearing highlighter head…”

“Is that really the best you can come up with?” The boy’s voice is dry, breathy, but unmistakably taunting.

Kojiro stops short. His fingers are twitching at his sides like he might leap forward and strangle the insufferable little brat, but instead of continuing forward, he points a finger at him with restrained irritation, declares, “I am going to get that kite down, and I _will_ fly it, damn it,” and without further ceremony turns and begins to scale the tree, burning with a righteous sort of indignation. It is only when he is halfway up the tree, fingers dug deep into the grooves of the old trunk’s crumbling bark and palms scraped rough, that the boy at last smiles to himself very softly in an almost charmed amusement, so Kojiro does not see it. But he does reach the top in very quick time, and once there he easily untangles the kite from the branches to send it drifting down to the ground. Then he shimmies back down the trunk just as swiftly and drops on his feet to land smirking at the boy smugly, although the effect is ruined somewhat by the twigs and leaves stuck in his hair and the dirt on the front of his clothes.

“See? Easy,” he declares.

The boy purses his lips, looking vaguely dissatisfied. He stoops and picks up the kite between two fingers delicately. “…I suppose.”

There follows a moment wherein Kojiro does not know what to reply with and so stands in silence as the boy ignores him with his head bent over the kite, suddenly feeling foolish but equally as unwilling to back down and leave him with the impression that he has gotten the better of Kojiro. But then the boy raises his head and holds out the kite, its string now untangled and wound neatly around its handle, a wry smile on his face, like a peace offering. He says, “I don’t suppose you know how to fly this thing, do you?”

“Do you not?” Kojiro answers, incredulous.

There is not a trace of embarrassment on the boy’s face as he shrugs. “You saw it stuck in the tree, didn’t you?”

Kojiro cannot help it—he laughs, loud and startled. When he reaches out to take the kite, the boy lets it go with nothing more than a birdlike tilt of his head.

“Sure, I can show you how,” he says. And then, almost as an afterthought, “My name’s Kojiro, by the way. Nanjo Kojiro. I live two houses down the road from you.”

“I’ve seen you around,” the boy says. “I’m Sakurayashiki Kaoru.”

A light wind picks up around the two of them, and the kite jumps in Kojiro’s arms like a bird yearning to be free. Loose strands of pink hair flutter around Sakurayashiki Kaoru’s face like the cherry blossom petals of his name blown loose in a swirl of sweet spring air. At that age, Kojiro is not paying attention, not truly, but inexplicably, the luminescence of his curious firefly-eyes as he watches Kojiro demonstrate how to fly the kite stays seared in his memory for a long time, always young and always immortalised, there under the stooping tree on the grassy hill against a clear blue sky.

***

_(mid-summer, 12 years old)_

From that day on, Kaoru and Kojiro become inseparable, much to their parents’ delight, rarely ever seen without the other and the eternal back-and-forth bickering that invariably follows wherever they go. They are enrolled in the same local elementary school in different classes, but where Kaoru is quiet and aloof and largely deemed unapproachable by the rest of his classmates ( _he thinks he’s so much smarter than the rest of us, our young master high-and-mighty,_ is what they say to each other, between disdainful glances), Kojiro, by some universal natural law that states all best friend pairs must be each other’s complement in every way like day and night, is loud and boisterous and very popular in his class. Nevertheless, Kojiro staunchly sticks by Kaoru’s side as far as possible. Every day he walks to and from school with Kaoru, bickering all the way, and every lunchtime without fail he waves off his friends and makes his way to the rooftop to meet Kaoru for lunch, where he fills the air with a stream of chatter about something or other and Kaoru absentmindedly picks at his food while turning the pages of a book with unflappable calm, humming every now and then in vague response. One such lunchtime, Kojiro brings with him a skateboard. It is his newest toy, given to him as a birthday present by his mother. As he pushes himself clumsily back and forth on the board while talking, its wheels rumbling noisily on the cement, Kaoru raises his head, a rare occurrence.

“Is that a skateboard?” he says.

Kojiro stops the aimless rolling of the board with his foot to laugh. At this age Kaoru is always reading in between the calligraphy sessions he bears patiently at the behest of his traditionalist parents, and probably knows more about the most eclectic mix of topics than the rest of their classes put together knows about their curriculum, but leave it to him to stare at something as mundane as a skateboard with the bemused air of someone faced with a strange creature.

“Yup,” he says. “Pretty cool, huh?”

Kaoru frowns slightly and brings a piece of tofu from his bento box into his mouth as if just now realising its existence. “It’s noisy.”

Kojiro laughs again, gets back onto the board and propels himself to the far side of the rooftop with one energetic push of his foot, opening his arms as if to embrace the wind blowing into his face and catch the current to fly right off the edge into the blue sky, like one of the kites they used to play with when they were younger. He doesn’t manage to catch himself before he smacks into the tall netted fencing there with a thump and a muttered curse, but when he turns around the sight he catches of Kaoru’s irritated scowl deepening at the sound of the skateboard makes it all worth it.

“You should try it, Kaoru!” he says. “Maybe you’ll like it. God knows it’ll do you some good to do something other than sit around reading all day, to get some fresh air and straighten that spine of yours that’s always bent over washi paper or your books like a shrimp.”

(Kaoru’s posture is always perfect, but Kojiro’s point stands. As a best friend it’s his duty to worry about Kaoru when he won’t do it himself, damn it.)

“No,” Kaoru replies. Swift and precise, like a surgical knife coming down.

Kojiro is undeterred. At this point he’d be almost alarmed if Kaoru had consented to try out the skateboard. “It’s fun. Just once, then you can go back to your book.”

“I said no,” Kaoru repeats calmly, but oh—how fascinating—he is eyeing the skateboard over the top of his book, a critical gleam in his eye, as if evaluating its suitability as a test subject for some kind of experiment. Kojiro senses victory, and like a bloodhound, seizes the opportunity.

“Didn’t your father buy you that robotics kit a while back? You wanted to put wheels to your robot, right? Come on, you can test the balance of it or… whatever… for yourself with this skateboard. It’d be really helpful to get some hands-on experience. Makes sense, yeah?”

“Not in the slightest,” Kaoru says, but he has lowered the book slightly, and the gleam in his eye has grown in interest almost imperceptibly. Kojiro knows to stop pushing; it is only a matter of time, now. He puts his hands up, says, “Suit yourself, then,” and proceeds to resume fooling around with the board, studiously pretending not to see the annoyed twitch of Kaoru’s eye as he fights to keep his concentration on his book through the racket.

He manages to keep this up for the next five days, dragging his skateboard up the steps to every one of their lunches and riding on it obnoxiously loudly right in front of Kaoru’s nose, before Kaoru’s patience reaches its breaking point. In classic Kaoru fashion, this manifests in a somewhat understated yet surprising way: he closes his book, sets it aside, and says in a raised voice, “Stop that, won’t you?”

Hiding a smile, Kojiro does a final kick turn just to watch Kaoru physically flinch at the harsh scrape of the wheels against the cement. Over the past few days he has discovered something of a talent for skateboarding and has improved rapidly, much to his own delight and his mother’s wariness due to her knowledge of her son’s penchant for getting into trouble. “Stop what?”

For a brief moment Kaoru lowers his gaze to his book sitting innocently beside him as if contemplating hurling it at Kojiro’s head as an impromptu missile, but ultimately he doesn’t. Kojiro decides he’s had his fun and won’t antagonise him any further. It looks like Kaoru would sooner die than admit defeat, and in this particular case, Kojiro is actually quite curious to see how Kaoru will tackle skateboarding, given that the last time he’s seen him engage in any sort of physical activity was two years ago when their parents sent them to swimming classes together. Kaoru had spent the first class angrily flailing like a cat dropped into water, tried to persuade his mother to stop the classes only to meet with an unbreakable iron wall of refusal, and consequently endured the rest of the lessons until he learned to swim with great difficulty as Kojiro floated gleefully in the water next to him between laps of perfect freestyle, shouting unhelpful pieces of advice. Thereafter he had somehow contrived, by some mysterious magic, to conjure up doctor’s notes for every P.E. class despite being in perfect health, to Kojiro’s great interest.

So Kojiro picks up the skateboard from the ground and says, holding it out, “Alright, fine. If you try the skateboard out just one time, and skate from this end of the roof to the other, I’ll stop bringing it to lunch.”

“Ugh,” Kaoru huffs, managing to convey all of his acerbic exasperation in that single sound, and springs to his feet to snatch the board from Kojiro. “You promise.”

Kojiro beams sunnily. “I promise!”

And so this is how Kaoru ends up staring warily down at the board as he attempts to stand on it and push himself along, wobbling like a leaf in a tempest, stumbling back off the board again in a panic every time he thinks he is about to fall. Eventually, with Kojiro’s help, as their lunch break draws to a close and a sheen of sweat has collected under Kaoru’s bangs, he manages to make it unsteadily and gracelessly to the other side of the rooftop, whereupon he jumps off the board and continues to hop on one foot forward with his unchecked momentum like an ungainly, long-legged bird, a weary look of suffering on his face. Kojiro lets out a sigh of relief. He, too, is sweating, not due to any physical exertion on his part but rather from the effort he spent trying not to laugh at Kaoru’s clumsy attempts, and then the unrestrained laughter that seized his entire frame in violent bursts when he did laugh. He steps forward.

“We-ell,” he says, drawing out the syllable with affected regret, “Congratulations! I guess that’s that, then. I keep my promises, so starting from today, you won’t ever have to see this thing again at lunch.”

He puts his foot on the skateboard and makes to slide it over to him, but Kaoru’s foot snaps up and lands on it with startling force before he can move, causing the end of the skateboard to jolt upwards sharply. Kojiro blinks.

“Lend it to me,” Kaoru says, his young golden eyes intense and feverishly bright with loathing.

“No!” Kojiro protests, alarmed, and childishly tries to pull the skateboard out from under Kaoru’s foot. “Buy your own if you like it so much!”

“I don’t like it,” Kaoru says calmly, tucking a strand of hair damp with sweat behind his ear. “I hate it. I detest it with a burning passion. But I hate failing even more, and I refuse to lose to this slab of wood.”

“You’re weird,” Kojiro complains, still tugging fruitlessly on the board. “And I thought the whole point of this was for me to leave you in peace to read your book. Let go, we’re going to be late to class!”

“I changed my mind. But fine, don’t lend it to me. I’ll just tell your mom you’ve been saving your lunch money by stealing my food at lunchtimes so you can buy that new game for your Nintendo that you’ve been eyeing.”

“You—” Kojiro sputters. “You dirty traitor! You said you’d never tell!”

Kaoru shrugs and lifts his foot off the board so that Kojiro trips at the sudden lack of opposing force and lands sprawled out on the concrete, face down, the edges of the skateboard digging into his ribs. He groans piteously, and Kaoru unsympathetically raises his voice over the sound to say, “And I won’t. If you come with me to the abandoned gas station near the beach after school for as many days as it takes to help me master this thing and put it in its place.”

“You…” Kojiro says darkly, crawling back up to his hands and knees, “Are a little demon. I will spit in your eye. I never should have let you on my skateboard. My mother thinks I’ve been slacking off in class, so I can’t stay past four thirty today.”

Kaoru taps his chin in thought and nods magnanimously, a king deeming a request made to him by his subject acceptable. “That’s alright. Well, I’ll see you after school, then.”

With that, he flicks a piece of dirt off Kojiro’s shoulder, scoops up his bento box and book in one arm, and disappears down the stairwell back to class, his ponytail flying like a scrap of ribbon behind him flitting into darkness. Kojiro follows only a moment afterward, grumbling to himself, and is very nearly late to class but manages to make it through the door a moment before the bell rings. The person sitting at the desk behind his gives him and the dirt on the front of his shirt a look, before asking, “Did you fall off your skateboard?”

“Something like that,” Kojiro responds sourly.

After school, they do meet at the gate as usual, and they do make it down to the abandoned gas station after all, amidst a constant stream of complaining from Kojiro that he has better things to do than babysit Kaoru just so he can protect his fragile ego, to which Kaoru only responds that they are literally the same age. The next evening repeats in much the same way, and then the next. Upon finding out about the entire affair, Kaoru’s mother buys him a skateboard of his own, delighted that her son is finally taking an interest in a physical activity. A week passes, and then another, and yet the phase does not end; it becomes a ritual of theirs, to go down to the abandoned gas station that has become their favourite hangout spot every day after school and skate around aimlessly, trying out new tricks that they saw on the Internet and failing hopelessly while the other scores them like a judge at the Olympics evaluating a performance. This is how that summer passes and, indeed, many others that will follow, continuing well into high school: vivid tie-dyed sunsets passed in the shadow of the station’s derelict, peeling sign, skating in lazy circles on the ground that mimic the paths of the birds in flight high overhead, the tang of the salt on the ocean breeze heavy in their mouths. Kaoru’s gaze, like sunlight on the wave crests below, trained on the ground in concentration as he fights to keep his balance. Kojiro, watching him from the side, telling himself at first that it’s just to make sure he doesn’t fall and break his teeth, but continuing even after such a concern becomes too unnecessary to still hold true. Their gas station, their secret, their own little slice of a kingdom to preside over.

But in their second year of junior high, Shindo Ainosuke comes to their school and introduces himself to their class with an unassuming smile and a pair of hands held delicately in place at his sides as he bows, the full ninety-degree angle, impeccably well-mannered. Kojiro remembers watching him walk through the door and take his seat afterward without much interest. Kaoru wasn’t even looking. But some days after that, he approaches them at lunch, those long-fingered, well-kept hands laced behind his back, and says that the teacher assigned him to work with them for the ongoing group project that started before he arrived.

The rest is history. Two turns to three. He finds out that they skateboard and says, gesturing excitedly with those expressive hands of his that could tell entire stories without need of a single word, that he does too. And suddenly the abandoned gas station grows a little louder on their after-school evenings, a little brighter, a little more alive. Shindo Ainosuke weaves himself into their lives with so much startling ease, into that inextricable single unit Kojiro-and-Kaoru, Kaoru-and-Kojiro, that they never notice the transition and fail to pick it out from a starfield of inconsequential moments even a decade later.

And yet, in the end, he is transient. He is temporary. And the gas station, too, once their private sanctuary like an extension of the shelter of their own beating hearts, is gone when he is gone.

— end of act 1 —

**Author's Note:**

> I never expected to end up writing fic for this show that I started watching on a whim one day & yet here we are
> 
> Now because I am pretentious, the summary and overall fic structure looks the way it does but do not be fooled, I don't have an outline for this story or even the second chapter written. I started writing at around episode 6 (?) but now I kind of want to stay canon compliant and living in fear every Saturday that the new episode was going to blow my backstory out of the water was getting really tiring, so I likely won't continue this until after the anime finishes airing.
> 
> ... of course the anime could show us some of the things i outlined here like kojiro and kaoru’s first meeting or otherwise allude to them in a way that contradicts my version on a slim off chance just as a divine act of spite towards me but if that happens we saw nothing ok


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